Louis Lortie

Pianist Louis Lortie first drew widespread attention before reaching his mid-twenties through performances marked by both power and refined nuance across a wide span of repertoire, with particular focus on music from the late Classical era through the early twentieth century. Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on April 27, 1959, he trained under Yvonne Hubert and made his initial professional appearance as soloist with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra at age thirteen. Rather than rushing into a full touring schedule, he waited until after capturing top honors at both the Canadian National Music Competition and the CBC National Competition at sixteen. He regards his 1978 engagement with the Toronto Symphony as his formal debut; that same year the orchestra took him along on its tour of Japan and the People’s Republic of China. In his early twenties he relocated to Baltimore to study with Leon Fleisher and broaden his acquaintance with keyboard literature.

The year 1984 brought first prize at the Busoni International Competition together with a prize at the Leeds Piano Competition. Exposure to European musical life and the visibility gained from these victories led to a heavier concert calendar and to his debut recording in 1986. Within a few seasons he appeared across the United States, Canada, and Europe with the Cleveland Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the Dallas Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the BBC Philharmonic, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Deutsche Symphonie Orchester, and the Orchestre National de France, the last of which he joined on tour. Summer residencies with the Montréal Symphony have featured single-composer surveys, and he has presented the complete cycle of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas on stages around the globe.

Few artists have maintained as enduring and fruitful a partnership with a label as the one Lortie enjoys with Chandos, which has documented his readings of repertoire stretching from Mozart to Ligeti. Among the projects are an award-winning set of Ravel’s complete piano music, the full Beethoven sonata cycle, and the complete works for piano and orchestra by Liszt; his accounts of Chopin’s Preludes and Etudes have also attracted special notice. In 2020 he issued the second installment of his survey of Saint-Saëns’s music for piano and orchestra, recorded with Edward Gardner and the BBC Philharmonic.

Whenever his calendar permits, Lortie has taught at the piano institute in Imola, Italy; he co-founded and serves as artistic director of the LacMus International Festival in Tremezzina, Italy; and he holds the post of master in residence at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Brussels. He has been named an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Knight of the National Order of Quebec.